Festival-goers in South Africa this summer will be able to order beer from their smartphones and have it delivered by a flying drone dropping a can attached to a parachute.

The drone has been developed by Darkwing Aerials and will be tested at the Oppikoppi music festival in the Limpopo province of South Africa this August.

Customers will be able to place their drink orders through an iOS app that will send their GPS coordinates to the drone operators.

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Ready for flight: The drone is loaded with a cold can of beer onto its claw-style mechanism. Cans are sent with individual parachutes that automatically deploy when the can is released

The drone takes off with its precious cargo and is manually flown to the location where the order was placed. The drone uses GPS co-ordinates to find the customer. It then releases the beer by parachute so it floats gently to the ground

WHAT IS AN OCTOCOPTER?

The beer drone is an octocopter, which means it has eight rotors.

It is an example of a multirotor aircraft.

Multirotors can also come with four rotors, called a quadrocopter, or six rotors, known as a hexacopter.

Multirotors use fixed-pitch blades so the rotor pitch doesn't vary as the blades rotate.

You can control the drone by changing the speed of each rotor, which changes the thrust and torque of the aircraft.

The amount of weight a multirotor can carry depends on the size and speed of the blades used.

Once an order is received, beer cans are attached to the drone and it is manually flown so it is directly above the customer.

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When the beer can is released by the claw and rolled off the ramp on the back of the drone, the parachute is automatically deployed.

The beer can then floats down to the ground and can be picked up by the customer.

A shot taken from the back of the beer drone shows the can attached to a specially constructed ramp, found on the underside of the drone. The can is held by a claw which opens when the drone reaches the correct location and the can rolls off the ramp

The system, including the beer can in its parachute harness, is shown off during tests in South Africa. The first commercial use of the device will be at the Oppikoppi festival in the Limpopo province this summer

Although the drone has to be manually
flown at the moment, designers are working on a model that will deliver
drinks automatically using a pre-programmed GPS grid.

The drone is a modified octocopter from SteadiDrone.

Last year, a San Francisco-based research lab called Darwin Aerospace invented the 'Burrito Bomber'.

Once an order was placed, a parachuted burrito was loaded into a storage compartment at the back of the drone.

The burrito was then flown to the location where the order was sent, and released.